SGI: Discussion

SGI top executives to speak at eighth annual SGI User Group conference
Key customer presentations, SGI Open House, ICE Cube™ and NASA tours will be featured

FREMONT, Calif., Apr 26, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — SGI (SGI 7.69, -0.28, -3.51%), a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that it will sponsor and participate in the 8th Annual SGI User Group (SGIUG) Conference to be held in Fremont, California, May 10-12, 2010. Top SGI executives, including Mark J. Barrenechea, SGI CEO, and Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, will be present at the conference. This year's event will feature tutorials, technical presentations and workshops. The SGIUG Conference is open to all SGI customers and partners.

“The SGIUG Conference is a unique event that brings together industry experts to provide valuable information about high-end modeling, simulation and data mining, and to share best practices, tips, techniques and ideas on high performance computing technologies with SGIUG members,” said Chuck Niggley, SGIUG president. “We are pleased that SGI works closely with the user group to help ensure its success.”

Conference highlights will include a technology presentation by Dr. Goh, as well as customer presentations by the Institute of Cancer Research and NASA Ames Research Center. A tour of the NASA Ames Research Center, home to the Pleiades Supercomputer, the largest SGI® Altix® ICE cluster — currently No. 6 on the TOP500 List, is also included. SGI will host an open house and reception at its corporate headquarters and conduct tours of its ICE Cube modular data center. Early bird registration is available until April 30.

“The SGIUG is an important organization that facilitates direct communication between SGI and our valued customers and partners,” said George Skaff, chief marketing officer at SGI. “We look forward to hearing their feedback and welcoming members to SGI headquarters for demos of our products, including the ICE Cube modular data center.”


SGI speaking sessions include (see program for full listing):

• SGI Keynote: SGI Directions Presented by: Mark J. Barrenechea, SGI CEO Date: Monday, May 10 Time: 1:00 p.m. PDT
• Technology Keynote: SGI Technology Trends Presented by: Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO Date: Monday, May 10 Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT
• Session: SGI Product Overview Presented by: Rick Chapek, senior vice president of hardware engineering Date: Monday, May 10 Time: 2:00 p.m. PDT

About SGIUG

The SGI User Group is an independent, worldwide community focused on sharing information and improving the technical productivity of SGI high performance computing and data storage systems.

The user group is open to all, and welcomes new members, suggestions for activities and volunteers to organize the user group. It spotlights both the Linux® and IRIX ® operating systems, creating a technical community for all SGI customers.

The SGI User Group is an ideal way to access tutorials and future plans from SGI, and to have discussions with other users that will help get more from investment in SGI. The user group has a close relationship with SGI to ensure success.

The overall mission of SGIUG is to serve as an open forum to foster exchange of ideas and methodologies among computer scientists, researchers and engineers. For more information, please visit www.sgiug.org .


About SGI

SGI is a global leader in large-scale clustered computing, high performance storage, HPC and data center enablement and services. SGI is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit www.sgi.com for more information.

© 2010 SGI. SGI, Altix and ICE Cube are registered trademarks or trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

<source: SGI via Business Wire >

So, IRIX isn't entirely dead yet? I mean, there's obviously stil an interest for it and at least they're still talking about it. (I won't get my hopes up, but it's still better than nothing).

Didn't find coverage of the conference in a cursory search, but I did find this article covering a visit by CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh with the Greater London LUG a couple weeks later in London. It doesn't seem like a bad piece in terms of what "SGI" appears to be up to these days. Perhaps it's not unfair to say this -- that SGI's brilliance was in making complex and difficult things much easier to accomplish. For most of their history that was graphics, animation, visualization and video/film. Nowadays they may still be making the complex manageable, just with respect to single-system-image clustered computing.

Still, it was nice to read some favorable coverage for a change.

If Rackable didn't come out with products like the Octane III and the Origin 400, you might hear fewer negative comments

Most SGI lovers really wanted them to do well but they seem pretty talented at butchering (what remained of) the SGI mystique.

I'd give it a while. Rackable might actually , or perhaps surprise us by producing workstations for us power hungry users. Nekochan
does draw a fair amount of attention. So maybe they'll keep us in mind when producing new RISC hardware lol.

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Ryan Fox, that'd be amazing and almost a ‘dream’ come true. I won't be counting on it, but like you say, who knows. (I know this site draws attention, because a lot of people I speak to — interested in UNIX and UNIX-like/derived systems — have often heard of this place.)